7110 SCSI-2 Host Adapter/Raid 7 Storage Sub-System
It's here: The first product in the open solutions family of products - 1st Solutions' 7110 SCSI Host Adapter teamed with Storage Computer's RAID7 Storage Sub-System. This advanced product combines ComputerVision's outstanding service and support with 1st Solutions' high-performance mass storage controller technology and Storage Computer's storage system. Together, they provide the ultimate in performance, reliability, service and connectivity for Prime 50 Series mass storage.
The 7110 is designed to run today's ultra-fast, high performance SCSI-2 devices at transfer rates never previously available on Prime 50 series. The 7110 runs synchronous SCSI-2 at 5 million bytes per second. The 7110 controller utilizes burst-mode data transfers on your 50 Series host. These systems are available for 4000, 5000, 6000 and 9000 Series systems.
RAID7 sets all-new performance standards for RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) products. You get almost all the benefits of mirroring, plus dramatically improved performance, and fully automated recovery even when completely unattended - all at substantially lower costs than mirroring.
For instance, if you want to mirror 25gb of storage, you need 50gb to do so with mirroring. That's 25gb of storage overhead. A RAID7 can provide 25gb of usable storage with only 27.5gb and still permit you to access all data, even if a disk drive is physically removed while running!
We offer the RAID7 with the latest, highest performance SCSI disk drive - the Seagate Barracuda. This drive turns at 7200 rpm - there is no faster disk drive available today. It provides up to 9gb of storage, and a 5 million byte-per-second transfer rate, coupled with a 9.5millisecond average seek. "Barracuda" is an apprpriate name as this drive has acquired a reputation for eating its competitors alive!
Baracuda has a Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) of 250,000 hours, so you won't have to worry about frequent disk drive failures. The best news is that these devices are surprisingly inexpensive. As to reliability, a lot of people talk about it, we put our money where our mouth is. We provide a 5 year warranty on the disk drives. This is the best performance and lowest cost per megabyte and longest warranty on storage ever offered on a Prime or ComputerVision product.
RAID 7 offers a number of important benefits. It moves the cost of mass storage more in line with typical industry costs. It provides the extraordinary performance our customers demand. Most importantly, RAID 7 supports multiple hosts. RAID 7 can be viewed as an amorphous storage device with a total capacity. That capacity can be divided up any way you want between hosts, and between virtual SCSI devices. The ability to support multiple hosts simultaneously saves you money and delivers performance.
Suppose, for instance, that you have a 6650, a large Sun-based server and a RAID 7 with 12 gigabytes of usable storage. You can connect your 6650 with the 7110 adapter to one port on the RAID 7, and configure that with four devices of 1.34gb each. The Sun can be connected to another port on the RAID, and be configured with three 2gb disk drives. RAID will manage the storage and provide dual, simultaneous access, as well as essentially fault-tolerant storage. If a drive or power supply fails, it warns you of the failure, and keeps on running. If you have a hot spare drive, the RAID 7 will spin it up and begin rebuilding the lost drive as a spare-time task. In the meantime, any requests for data will be filled by reconstructing the data from the other drives and parity drive.
Rack-mount versions of the RAID 7 can support up to 12 independent host connections. This can be any assortment of Prime, Sun, DEC', Data General, Hewlett-Packard, IBM' RS/6000 and PC- based systems. Minimum storage is about 5gb. You can get up to 15gb 'n a tabletop, while the rack- based system can provide over 2OOgb of storage without data compression,
RAID 7 also can reconfigure storage. If you move an application off your 6650 to another host that is connected, you can quite literally de-commit the storage on one host and make it reappear on the other host without moving any cables or equipment, saving, or reloading the other data. This makes it easy and cost effective to support your 50 Series today, and move the storage logically to other platforms as you convert applications. You can even configure the system to allow multiple hosts to see the same data, effectively multi-porting the SCSI disc drives.
Expanding the capacity on the RAID 7 is simple.- you just add the new disk drives and run the expansion utility. This must be done off line, but it avoids having to save and restore all data, which would take you off line for a much longer period of time. For instance, expanding the system from 5gb to 10gb takes about one hour to re-stripe the data. It takes another 25 minutes to rebuild the parity drive; however, that can be done in background while the system is on-line.
To insure the utmost reliability, memory used for the RAID cache is error correcting, the same as in your 50 Series systems. To insure adequate CPU performance in the RAID 7, it comes standard with 16mb of error-correcting cache storage, and a processor that runs in excess of 30 million instructions per second. Each internal SCSI bus (and there is one for every disk drive), has its own 128k static memory buffer.
For those unfamiliar with RAID technology, the higher level models work by spreading the data across the disk drives and taking advantage of parallel data transfers. On a RAID 7, each disk drive is on its own SCSI bus, so internal transfer rates can be as high as 100 million bytes per second!
A parity stripe is calculated for each "stripe" of data. In the event of failure, the parity stripe and data stripe allow the missing data to be reconstructed with 100 percent accuracy. In addition, the device will rebuild the lost data on a new drive in less than one hour. Drives and power supplies are "hot swappable." If they tail, they can be changed while the system is running to insure maximum availability of your data.
Check our features and check our price. Then decide who has the most cost-effective solutions. The 7110/RAID 7 comes with our performance guarantee: We will outperform any and every other SCSI device you can put on your Prime system today!
